Colorado Dreamin’
Last week I had an awesome opportunity to spend a few days snowboarding, relaxing, and getting beat up by trees in Winter Park, Colorado. Having spent most of my time here on the East Coast it was amazing to witness the breathtaking scenery and culture out in Winter Park. If you like snow and want to get away, I definitely recommend visiting! The Mountains are Huge… Like Really Huge
Growing up I’ve frequently visited the local mountains within a few hours of Northern Virginia, and they now seem like mole hills in comparison to the mountains out west. In the handful of days that I was there I did my best to explore as much of the mountain as I could, but despite my efforts the last day of my trip came and I realized I only hit a tiny fraction of the skiable terrain (which turned out to be over 3,000 acres).
Altitude is No Joke
I’m by no means an elite level athlete, but I feel like I’m in decent shape. So when I began walking up a flight of stairs and started breathing heavy I couldn’t help but think… “HUH!?”
The base of Winter Park is about 9,000ft above sea level, with the highest peak being 12,060ft. Compare this to Northern VA’s ~500ish ft above sea level.
I could almost FEEL the decreased oxygen levels in the air, which is a big reason for some endurance athletes using altitude training to improve performance when competing at lower elevations. The idea is that the body will start to acclimatize to the thin air and adaptations will occur, such as naturally increased erythropoietin (leading to increased red blood cells), increased number of blood vessels, and increased buffering capacity. In other words, improving the body’s oxygen delivery system. It is still a controversial training method and I cannot say from dedicated experience that it “works” (I was there for five days and I doubt my mile time improved).
If you’re planning a trip to a location of high altitude I’ll pass along the advice that the locals told me: “Drink a ton of water and don’t overexert yourself.”
Elbow Dislocations are a Rare but Awful Injury
Like other sports and activities, injuries are just an unfortunate slice of the snowboarding pie. A friend of mine took a hard fall while bombing down a hill at probably 45 mph, and didn’t get up as quickly as I’d hoped. During the tumble his shoulder ended up locked into internal rotation with his forearm trapped between his back and the ground, all while skidding across the snow.
This resulted in the bones in his elbow (humerus, radius, and ulna) separating from eachother. Despite the severe pain and gross looking elbow he handled it like a champ and we were able to get him to ski patrol.
According to a veteran in the ski patrol department, an elbow dislocation is one of the highest ranked injuries purely from a pain scale perspective. Apparently it is a very rare injury as well, at least on the slopes. With close to 40 years of ski patrolling under his belt, he has only seen two elbow dislocations during his career.
Pizza and Honey is a Match Made in Heaven
After a hard day of riding we went to get some food and ended up at the resort’s pizza parlor. When I walked inside I noticed something strange: there was a bottle of honey at the tables.
Confused and afraid, I demanded answers. The response was simply “Um… to put on your pizza? Duh.” I drizzled some honey on my pizza and was very pleasantly surprised at how delicious it was. It was even better with honey+sriracha.
My friend’s injury was a bummer, but otherwise I had a great time in Winter Park. The community is extremely friendly (no one locks their doors!), the food is great, the mountain is amazing, and the scenery is really out of this world. I definitely cannot wait to visit again!
Getting Dunked On
Fingers are pointed, laughs are boisterous, and a sense of embarrassment often fills a basketball player when he gets dunked on. I previously wrote about the reaction to Guard Brandon Knight getting dunked on by Center DeAndre Jordan. Brandon Knight: Dunked ON!
Having worked with basketball players at the high school, college, and pro level I have noticed that the “getting dunked on” phenomenon is something that exists at all levels of basketball. The act of dunking on someone should have more to do with the dunker rather than the player who was dunked on, yet players around the country often focus on the defender.
After the Knight dunk, NBA players took to twitter to voice their opinion:
Harrison Barnes, the rookie starting Small Forward for Golden State said, “Why jump B Knight?”
LeBron James said, “Hey coach Spo I'm gone have to just give those 2 pts up!! Hahahaha! Damn Brandon Knight. Gots to he more careful!”
Shelvin Mack, who recently signed a 10-day contract with the Atlanta Hawks said, “Why did he jump?”
Brandon Rush, who has played 2 games this year due to a season ending injury said, “Brandon Knight, no bro.”
Knight, who graduated from high school with a 4.3 PGA and was the Gatorade National Player of the Year, took the ribbing by his peers in stride by making light of the dunk. He also took the ball to the hoop on the very next possession and got to the foul line, where he made 2 free throws.
The perception that Knight did something wrong by making an attempt to block a shot is crazy to me. He was simply doing his job by playing defense. Great players are willing to take risks and fail. What if the 6-3 Point Guard was able to block the 7-foot Center? Surely that would have been impressive, and more importantly, it would have stopped 2 points from going in the basket.
It is with that in mind that I decided to lookup some of the greatest basketball players of all time and see if they’ve been dunked on. I found footage of Jordan, Barkley, Duncan, Ewing, Mutombo, O’Neil, Wade, Bryant, and James all getting dunked on. You can checkout my video here …..
Turns Out, the Legends Get Dunked On, Too!
So it turns out that Knight is actually in quite good company. And maybe, just maybe, he took his first step toward greatness. So the next time a guy gets dunked on, how about we give praise to not only the dunker, but also the player who was dunked on. After all, it certainly is an act work acknowledging, but for completely different reasons.
Lessons of the Jaw: A Few Thoughts on the Body's Intradependence
As you read this, I'm either in surgery or in the recovery room. For those who don't know, I am having lower jaw surgery to correct a severe over (also called "open bite") and cross bite. That being said, blogging might be a bit spotty (more so than usual) over the next couple weeks, but I'm going to do my best. Seeing as this surgery has been on the forefront of my mind for quite a while, I thought I'd share a bit of the physiology connections I've learned over the past year or so. It's actually pretty interesting how dependent the body is on it's collective parts. So dependent that something up in my face affects the rest of my body rather dramatically. We'll do bullet points because I really like them.
Lesson 1: Pain is sneaky. Sometimes the origin and/or cause is not where you think.
I've known I would need this corrective surgery at some point for quite a while now. About 3 years ago, I experienced severe and prolonged pain in my tempromandibular joint (TMJ), the hinge joint of your jaw that connects the lower to the upper. I didn't have the means to have surgery at the time and the pain receded a bit, so I put it on the back burner. Just over a year ago, I started having migraine/severe headaches in the front of my head that would last for days, even weeks. Medications didn't help. Then I started to have shoulder pain on my right side. This made me think something else was going on since I knew I wasn't doing anything that would aggravate my shoulder.
I popped over to this site and discovered that a tight sternocledomastoid can cause both pain in the head and shoulder. Sure enough, I had knots the size of marbles all along these muscles. Guess what? The SCM connects right up behind the ear, near the TMJ, thus a misaligned jaw (being used for thousands of reps per day) will definitely cause some tension in the poor ol' SCM.
Lesson 2: The suboccipital muscles are really, really important.
I also had pain in the base of my skull on a regular basis, thanks to irritated suboccipital muscles. I trolled around to find some information and perhaps home treatment to help manage the pain symptoms. I came across fellow strength coach, Patrick Ward's post here. Readit, seriously, it applies to everyone. It'll blow your mind how important those little muscles are to your overall health. Patrick Ward goes into the implications of tight suboccipitals and their effect down the stream, such as posture in general and neural control over postural muscles. I found it interesting that "voluntary trunk control" was one of the muscle functions affected. Guess what? I struggle with bracing my right side. I know that sounds weird, but I can not get as "tight" on the right side without really thinking about it. Might be why I have a collapsed disc to the right side?...
Lesson 3: It's seriously all connected.
Then I came across this paper (you don't have to read the whole thing unless you're super-into-science and research papers) that linked symptoms of TMJ dysfunction and jaw pain with the suboccipital muscles. Check out pages 13 (yup, I have all those symptoms, including impaired vision) I should also note that I've suffered from vertigo since I was 13, so perhaps, once my jaw/bite is corrected and those muscles are no longer strained, I might see a decrease in symptoms. Page 15 which connects hypertonic (too tight) neck muscles with TMJ muscles dysfunction and pain, and 17 describing short cervical muscles and posture and how they research has found correlations... craziness. Upper cross syndrome, a posture <--- description used by those in the health field, is either a creator of tight neck muscles or the result of tight suboccipitals. It's a bit of chicken-egg questions, but either way, they tend to coexist. So, if you have a hunched posture, try massaging the base of your skull, that might help loosen some things up!
Lesson 4: Pain eventually conquers proprioception
We recently had an in-service where we learned about the neuromuscular implications of injuries in regards to training athletes. The main point I retained was, if muscle tissue is acutely damaged, such as a sprain, or chronically irritated, such as repeated spraining of said ankle, the muscle spindles, which reside in the tendons, will no longer respond accordingly, much like Ariel responding to her father's command to stay away from land... Poorly.
Muscle spindles are proprioceptive organs that control the stretch-reflex, for example when the doctor taps your knee and your leg kicks forward a bit, the muscle spindles are rapidly stretched (when the mallet hits your patella tendon) and they respond by sending a signal to your brain to flex the quads (thus, pulling your knee into a bit of extension).
So, damaged muscle tissue, specifically the muscle spindles and especially chronically damaged tissue ("damaged" doesn't necessarily mean an acute injury, but a chronic posture, like your shoulders slumping and your neck protruding forward as you peer at the computer screen) tend to lose their ability to provide valuable feedback to the body in the form of proprioception (where your body is in space i.e. balance). Instead, pain signals are sent. This is bad on two fronts: 1) it hurts 2) lack of proprioception means loss of muscular control, be it voluntary or involuntary.
I don't know too much on how to restore muscle spindles and transfer them back to being proprioceptive and not pain oriented, but I do know that a) removing the irritaing stimulus (in my case, setting my jaw in the correct alignment) b) improving tissue quality through manual therapy (professional or at home) and c) retraining the muscles to move how they should (i.e. standing up straight instead of slouching, or going back to the ankle example, walking without a limp or favoring the ankle).
Lesson 5: Implications for training.
Another random fact, there's a correlation with a cross bite and scapular winging (the shoulder blade sticking up instead of laying flat on the rib cage). Winging impairs overhead movement, messes up the rhythm of the humerus and shoulder girdle and makes picking and lifting heavy things a bit problematic. I've done just about every exercise under the sun to fix my wing, to no avail... maybe surgery?
Anyway, as a coach, just by looking at my own situation helps me work with our athletes here at SAPT. If at first the basic, usual cues don't fix a problem, like "pulling yourself to the floor" during a push up to fix a winging scapula or "crack a walnut" to prevent knee pain during the squat, then, maybe there's an underlying issue that demands a different approach. Maybe some dedicated soft tissue work is in order to correct a nagging pain or it might be severe enough to refer out to a physical therapist or doctor. Whatever the case, if after working with an athlete diligently doesn't solve the problem, probably time to delve a bit deeper. (and check their bite! Kidding.)
Some SAPT Video Highlights: Post-Rehab Deadlifts, 1,000lb Prowler Drags, Pistol Shenanigans, and More
I have a number of topics I'd like to write about, but they'll have to remain on the back burner for a little while due a few pressing deadlines occupying my time. I know a few of you are waiting for me to do a Q & A based on a few email questions that have been sent my way; I'll be getting to those soon, I promise. In the meantime, hope you enjoy!
1. The other evening, I was shootin' the breeze with a couple of our interns, when the topic of pistol squats became infused into our dialogue.
I made a sarcastic comment to Chavez, along the lines of "Hey, why don't you try a pistol squat to a box jump, I think that'd be really easy." (Translation: I can think of a thousand activities that would be safer than attempting a pistol squat to box jump, one of which being throwing yourself into a lion's den with a T-bone strapped to your face, and another being hopping into a live volcano.)
Well, next time I'll learn to hold my tongue, as apparently Chavez doesn't back down from a challenge, no matter how outrageous it may be:
2. Many of you know Conrad from this story that Coach Tadashi wrote up on Conrad entering his first powerlifting meet just a couple months out of his second total knee replacement surgery. (Mind you, the two operations took place within a year of each other.)
Well, we have been continuing to help him along with his post-rehab training, and needless to say he has been doing spectacular, along with recently celebrating his 65th birthday to boot.
Just this past week he hit a 2-rep deadlift at 225lbs + 60lbs chains, so, using our arithmetic skills, that gives him 285lbs at the top of his pull. As you can see, he still had PLENTY of room in the tank to spare. Good stuff!!!
He's come a long way with his deadlift technique over the past few months. Sure, he could extend his T-spine slightly more, and pack the neck, but I give him three green lights for the time being.
3. One of our prior high school athletes, Carson, has been enrolled in our Distance Coaching Program since he left for college last Fall. Throughout his first 12-week distance training cycle with SAPT, he added an impressive 35lbs to his prior deadlift max (410lbs).
Here he is ripping a solid 445 pounds off the ground. I'm saying he'll have 500lbs in his grasp well before he graduates college!
Way to go, Carson.
4. Big Joe - even though he's an "endurance athlete" - finds anything involving heavy weights, or a challenging task, unconditionally palatable. Mix the two together and you get a 1,000lb Prowler Forward Drag by Big Joe from last Saturday morning:
Strong!
5. Here is Sheik, a cat who resides in the same dwelling as Kelsey and I. The other day, she insisted on refusing to allow any Hershey's kiss to remain alive while she still walked the Earth. She inexorably hunted down and destroyed them all, no matter how many continued to slide across the table in their efforts to pass her by.
That's all for now. Hope everyone has a great weekend!
Ryan Wood at Aggressive Strength’s SPF Powerlifting Meet
About a week and a half ago a good friend and former SAPT coach Ryan Wood competed in his most recent powerlifting meet. I once again served as his “handler” for the meet. A “handler” is basically the lifter’s personal assistant throughout the meet, helping him/her into and out of their powerlifing gear, assisting with warm-ups, wrapping knees, and basically taking care of all miscellaneous business so that the lifter can focus on three things: squatting, benching, and deadlifting!
Here is a recap of his performance that earned him first place in the 181 single-ply division!
SQUAT
The squat is definitely Ryan’s best lift. He opened up with an EASY 390, and cruised right through his second attempt of 425. From there we called for 450 on his third attempt, which flew up surprisingly fast. 3 for 3 on the squat, with a 19lb PR!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoTmBoQgmN0
BENCH
My biggest concern with Ryan’s bench was waiting for the “rack” call on the attempts. Failing to wait for the head judge to give a “rack” call before placing the bar back onto the hooks will result in a missed lift, no matter how pretty the actual bench press looked. Some of Ryan’s training partners let me know that he was falling into the habit of racking the bar too early, so with every attempt I made sure the last thing he heard from me was “wait for the ‘rack’”.
His opener of 295 looked like dynamic effort work (it was lightning fast), and proceeded to hit 325 with no problem. His third attempt was 350, which was a grind, but he pushed through it and locked it out. All commands from the judge were obeyed and he went 3 for 3 on the bench, with a whopping 48lb PR!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQ4outaCFG0
DEADLIFT
Ryan will be the first to tell you that the deadlift is his arch nemesis. It is continually improving, but has always been a weak point in his powerlifting repetoire. He opened up with 375, a very clean pull. Second attempt was 405, which wasn’t too slow, but it definitely drained him. We called for 425 for his third attempt, and although he gave it a good ride the bar wouldn’t budge past his knees. 2 for 3 on the deadlift, but still walked away with a 2lb PR!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jllGgE5dwGc
TOTAL
All in all Ryan ended up with a 1205 total, a 69lb total PR, and 1st Place in his division! His consistency and hard work during his meet prep paid off, and got to leave the meet with some new numbers in the books, a plaque, and some new goals to achieve in his next meet. Big thanks to all those who came and showed support!
Timeout Strategy
One of my favorite hand motions in basketball is the signal for a “20 second timeout”. Coaches lift their arms, bend their elbows, and touch shoulders with their fingers to signal a stoppage in play. It’s a technique that I often use with clients, family, and friends to pause discussions. While the 20 second timeout signal is universally known in the basketball world, the communication that occurs after the motion varies from coach to coach. I have been fortunate to be part of many different teams, in many different sports, and often observe the strategies used in that brief, but important interaction. Below is what I have found to be most effective. If you aren’t a coach think about when you have to deliver information to people in a quick and concise manner.
Attention Getter: Whether it’s clapping, demanding eye contact, or simply asking a question, it’s imperative that attention is gathered quickly. Make sure to have an attention getter that gets your team focused.
Encourager: Once you have their attention offer an encourager. An encourager will keep their attention and let them know what they are doing well. It will open their minds and foster opportunities for more feedback.
Information: The meat of your timeout should occur after the attention getter and encourager. This is a time to give feedback, negative or positive, which should be the most important point you are looking to provide.
Encourager: After the information has been processed an encourager is recommended to send the team on their way. It’s a great opportunity to build cohesion leaving a huddle and remind the players that you believe in them.
Hope you can find a way to use the attention getter, encourager, information, encourager method whenever you have a timeout today.
